Book Review: The Mummy Bloggers, by Holly Wainwright

When 3 popular blogging mummies are nominated for a prestigious award, old rivalries linking them & their families are bought to a head, setting the stage for a brutal but hysterically funny battle for influencer glory and Instagram fame.

When was the last time were scrolling through your Instagram feed only to be met with the perfectly curated image of an unearthly beautiful and serene looking mother of two or three who just seems to have it all together (I’m looking at you Bec Judd)? Was it this morning, or even 5 minutes ago? The fact is that gorgeous and successful social media savvy mums are taking over our social media feeds. Holly Wainwright’s debut novel, The Mummy Bloggers, is a riotously funny look at exactly this phenomenon.

The book follows a group of three women who each have highly successful blogs about their vastly different experiences with motherhood and how exactly to best navigate the endeavour we call being a mum.

Elle is a Lorna Jane loving mum with an insanely organised fridge and pantry of only clean foods, but a not so cohesive personal life. Her thirst for success and internet fame is unstoppable!

Abi is the mung bean earth mother who lives in the countryside in a converted barn house and claims to eat only organic food but secretly bribes her children with Kit Kats when she needs them to behave.

Rounding up the trio is Leisel who is a hard working mother of three, whose maternal guilt over spending so much time at the office constantly threatens to overwhelm her. Oh, and on top of all of that, Leisel also has a stalker…

When all three mummies are nominated for a prestigious blogging award, old rivalries linking the three women and their families are bought to a head and the stage is set for a brutal but hysterically funny battle for influencer glory and Instagram fame.

If these three characters sound like somewhat of a trope of a woman you may know, you’re probably right. We all know a mum who is a little bit like these three characters and this is what makes this book so relatable. While The Mummy Bloggers does sometimes fall into the trap of painting an almost caricature of women’s experiences of motherhood, it never fails to do so with a light-hearted nature and a tongue in cheek self awareness that is rarely seen in modern literature for women.